


Music for dreams, and the smoking of bitter ashes

by LaVoileBlanche



Series: Outside the world seems a violent place [4]
Category: Class (TV 2016)
Genre: Canon Disabled Character, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, First Time, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Ram POV, Spoilers for s01e04: Co-owners of a Lonely Heart
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-08
Updated: 2016-11-08
Packaged: 2018-08-29 21:56:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 823
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8506918
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LaVoileBlanche/pseuds/LaVoileBlanche
Summary: April is like that, like an effusion of light, and once she’s happened to him, he can’t understand how he didn’t see it coming.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from Jorge Luis Borges' "Two English Poems".

Ram isn’t expecting April at all. Because there’s a narrative at work here, and he’s got it all figured out - he’s going to be the best footballer Coal Hill Academy ever made, and he’s going to get grades that make his parents proud, and one day he’s going to play for Arsenal and marry the prettiest girl in the year group because she told him she knew what he was really like.

It only takes one night, one miserable night of chaos and pain, to systematically rip every part of that story to pieces. If he closes his eyes, sometimes he can still feel the warm spray of Rachel’s blood on his skin, and he doesn’t think he’s ever going to forget the shocked look on her face, just before she’d died - but more than died, disintegrated, broken down into atoms a foot away from him while he’d just stood, useless. The worst thing about it is that her parents still think she’s missing.

He’s got his leg working a little better but it’s not like it was, and now that Coach is gone (gone, because Ram had all but pushed him through an interdimensional portal to get eaten by a big fuckoff dragon, as if he didn’t have enough to deal with), football doesn’t really feel the same. He keeps the framed Henry print up in his room anyway because he doesn’t want to disappoint his dad, and because despite all the hideous things he’s seen in the last month, some young part of him still wants to believe in that future, like he might wake up one day and it will all have been some twisted, awful nightmare. Quill will still just be the worst teacher he’s ever had, and April, Charlie and Tanya will just be the nerds he never talks to in Physics. Maybe him and Rachel would have been Prom King and Queen. 

His dad thinks he should get therapy, but Ram knows anyone normal will think he’s lost it if they listened to half the things he’d have to say. Besides, Tanya takes his Skype calls even when it’s three in the morning, and April had kissed him in that bus shelter like she didn’t even care he was broken, so maybe he doesn’t need help. He doesn’t have a lot of time to think about the kiss, not until Miss Quill has driven the bus through the Lankin’s gross stem thing and he’s sure Tanya is going to be okay, but when he does, he thinks it’s probably the lightest thing that’s happened to him since Prom. April is like that, like an effusion of light, and once she’s happened to him, he can’t understand how he didn’t see it coming.

In the soft, afternoon glow of her bedroom, everything quilted and warm in the day, pages of music scattered around the room and him, shaking with her in his arms, he lays his palm against her chest and feels, for a moment, her heart. It’s the strangest thing, there one beat, and gone, and there again, and he looks up at her, a little awed, a little terrified. It’s such a fragile thing, that ties her to life. She just smiles gently down at him, and he thinks his own heart thumps just as unevenly in his chest. He misses Rachel, of course he does, but he can’t think of her when he and April lie like this, her hair unbound and her slender fingers wound in his - calloused from her music, he thinks.

He can tell something is wrong when he leaves, and when he comes back, she’s holding the Shadowkin’s blades over her father like she means to do something irreversible. He’s not going to stand there and pretend he knows her, not really, but he has seen a weapon like that sticking out of the front of his girlfriend’s chest, and he knows enough to know that if April lets this happen, she’ll never forgive herself.

“I know exactly what you’re capable of,” he tells her, “but you’re April because you choose not to do it!” 

There’s a minute where she looks back at the man cowering on the floor and he thinks she’s going to do it anyway, but she doesn’t - and through all the chaos that follows, he’s so breathlessly relieved that he almost doesn’t react in time when what she does instead is throw herself through a door in space and time to get what’s hers back from the monster who’d killed Rachel. 

“Tell my dad!” he tells Tanya, knowing she will and knowing she’ll hate him for it, and as fast as he can on his awkward, asymmetrical legs, he throws himself through the portal, too.

He’d told April that this is a fight the Shadowkin will not win. He’s not going to be made a liar. And he’s sure as hell not going to be useless anymore.   

**Author's Note:**

> Ram's perspective is a totally new beast for me, and I'm still not sure I nailed it, but never mind. He had a lot of cute scenes with April in the newest episode - it's kind of a shame they didn't give him more time to grieve Rachel, though.
> 
> If you've come here after reading the rest of this series, then you know you can find me at queer-z0mbies.tumblr.com, and if you haven't, well, now you too know where you can find me.


End file.
